What do you mean by "API-less" ?

[KaKi87]

^ Title ^

[SpacingBat3]

Simply, the client does not directly use the Discord API unlike to other clients. I've added this as it is the key difference between other clients like Cordless, which mainly do XHR requests to get data about the Discord. WebCord does use for that purpose the official Discord website and does any of these by itself. And while Discord website does send some requests, it's still a safer choice as requests are always send the way Discord intended to do so, with the same parameters and API version Discord could expects from their official version. This greatly eliminates the risk of being banned due to being a selfbot (a bot with regular user account) and makes WebCord easier to hide as it behaves from Discord's side exactly as a Chromium browser.

I plan however to change that for a Fosscord instances – their web clients aren't that great and consistent with Discord's styling, so its better to implement an API-based client for them. This will however take time and I won't likely be implemented in the nearest future.

[KaKi87]

Thanks for the explanation.
I think the "API-less" term can be misleading.
Despite being longer, I'd say something like "the official Discord client wrapped into a customizable Electron app".

[SpacingBat3]

I think the "API-less" term can be misleading.

I think I'll remove it anyway once either there will be (optional) feature like RPC that uses Discord API or it will use Discord API for Fosscord implementation (I think then it would be misleading). At least now I don't think that term is really misleading, maybe I could replace this with implemented without Discord API to make it concise which API WebCord avoids to use. And the "API-less" term is actually quite accurate to describe how Discord website behaves – from my research, it can fetch some details about the user (e.g. guild lists, account details) without doing any of the requests or at least without doing it every time the page reloads. So it either seems that Discord doesn't actually use their API for everything or tries to avoid using it when the data is already available in localStorage (and somehow detects it if it is out-of-sync).

[KaKi87]

Technically, your app does make requests to Discord's API, even if it's not your code that does it.

For me, "API-less" would mean that the app works without making requests to any web API, which can't be true for any working messaging software.

In other circumstances, the term would make me relate to Minecraft's offline mode, or something like that.